Shopping habits: In for a pound
        中产阶层也爱买廉价品

TWICKENHAM, a suburb in south-west London, is not the sort of place where discount stores traditionally thrive. Its unemployment rate is low; the typical wage is 54% higher than the national average. Yet one of the more successful local businesses is the Poundland store. Since opening in 2010, the shop has become a favourite of the town’s middle-class shoppers.

Garden fertiliser and toys are piled in the windows. On a weekday morning, pensioners and mothers with toddlers browse the aisles buying up bags of crisps, shampoo, books and cheap electronics. Almost everything on sale costs £1.

Little cheer has pervaded Britain’s high streets since the economic downturn began in 2008. The proportion of empty shops has increased from 3% to 14%, according to the Local Data Company, a research firm. But Poundland, which currently has 450 shops, is expanding at a rate of 60 outlets per year. Its competitors are doing almost as well. 99p Stores, a Poundland imitator, is adding 30 shops a year: it has increased its profits by an average of 72% annually over the past three years. Lidl and Aldi, two German discount-supermarket chains, have increased their combined market share by 44% since 2008.

That is perhaps to be expected, given cheap high-street rents and falling real wages. Yet much of the growth at discount retailers no longer comes from the poor. Poundland is expanding fastest in the affluent south-east—as well as Twickenham, new stores have opened in leafy places like Guildford, in Surrey, and Huntingdon, in Cambridgeshire. 99p Stores are opening new shops in more prestigious shopping malls. Lidl and Aldi stock middle-class luxuries such as Parma ham and prosecco wine alongside the baked beans and cheap biscuits.

According to Edward Garner, an analyst at Kantar, a market-research firm, “consumers are much less sniffy than they were.” They still buy most of their groceries at supermarkets, but top this up with trips to discounters. Cut-price stores still make up less than 10% of the market by volume, according to data from IGD, another market-research firm, but over 40% of shoppers visit at least one monthly. The British have finally realised that “it’s not clever to pay more than you have to”, reckons Jim McCarthy, Poundland’s CEO.

Discounters “pick out the easy bits” of supermarkets’ business, says Hussein Lalani, a co-founder of 99p Stores. Shoppers are lured with cheap essentials, such as batteries, shampoo, toothpaste and the like. By not stocking perishables such as fresh fruit or vegetables, discounters keep down their costs. A smaller range helps too. A typical supermarket can contain 25, 000 different items. By contrast, a branch of 99p Stores stocks around 3, 000.

More traditional supermarkets are reacting to this insurgency by stepping up investment in their cheaper own-brand lines. Tesco, by far the biggest supermarket chain in Britain, rebranded its “value” line last year. Sainsbury’s, its main competitor, is trying to adapt too, starting to sell more cheap clothes, household goods and electronics as well as food.

A risk lurks here for supermarkets however. Value ranges sell briskly, but if they cannibalise sales of more profitable products, the result may be a net loss. Thus the rise of the cheap shops is set to continue. In Germany, where until recently real wages had been stagnant for decades, discount stores account for 40% of the market. The new British appetite for a bargain could well outlive the recession.